10 Haunting Details Surrounding Johnny Gosch, The Paperboy Who Completely Disappeared In 1982

6 /10 A Visit in 1997

Conspiracy theories abound, including one from Noreen herself. She claimed to have seen her son again in 1997.

According to her story, Johnny went home accompanied by an unidentified man. Noreen recognized her son, despite not seeing him for about 15 years because he lifted his shirt to reveal the birthmark on his chest.

The story became even more bizarre when she said they spoke for more than an hour during the unexpected encounter. Johnny told her mother that he had been put into a pedophile ring.

5 /10 Unproven Theory

Assuming the visit and face-to-face conversation ever took place, it is difficult to grasp the idea that Noreen did not forcefully rescue her son.

In November 2006, she also reported having discovered some photographs of three boys being gagged at her front door. Noreen said one of the boys was 12-year-old, Johnny.

However, the image was not clear enough to make an identification. Her husband Leonard was unwilling to corroborate any of those accounts, and he did not believe Johnny ever came home, let alone spoke with Noreen.

4 /10 Why Johnny Can't Come Home

A few years after the alleged visit, Noreen released her book Why Johnny Can’t Come home.

In addition to telling stories about Johnny, the book criticized the authorities for their inadequate actions in the wake of her son’s disappearance. She said the police waited for 45 minutes before taking the report seriously.

It was initially treated as a runaway case even when they eventually did. At that time, they could not classify the disappearance as a missing person case until 72 hours.

3 /10 Bullhorn

According to Noreen, among all the mistakes the police made during the early investigation phase was how police chief Orval Cooney took a bullhorn, went to the park, and told everybody to stop searching.

He quickly (almost too easily) assumed that Johnny was a runaway.

Former Police Captain of the West Des Moines Police Department Cameron Coppess said the police once investigated a person who testified to being involved in the kidnapping, but the lead was a dead end.

2 /10 More Accounts

In 2018, some new accounts surfaced through Faded Out, a podcast focusing on missing persons cold cases.

Some people claimed to have come from the same area as Johnny Gosch contacted the podcast and shared information about what they thought of the case.

Few of those people used to be newspaper boys, and they said there were local individuals in the neighborhood who tried to lure them into the trap of sex trafficking.

Those individuals were later arrested and imprisoned. Still, details and corroborations are scarce at best.

1 /10 An Open Case

Orval Cooney is deceased, and Cameron Coppess cannot verify whether the bullhorn incident occurred.

If one pushed for a silver lining, it was that Johnny’s disappearance taught law enforcement all across the country a lot about how to handle a missing person case.

Johnny Gosch is still officially a missing person, and the issue remains open.

Be that as it may, new leads are hard to come by. Local police receive only about five tips annually, and not all of them are worth taking a closer look at.